The Men Who Live Forever

The Men Who Live Forever by Christopher McDougall
In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of Indians carries an ancient secret: a diet and fitness regimen that has allowed them to outrun death and disease. We set out to discover how the rest of us can catch up.
Salvador, our amateur guide and Semipro Mariachi singer, is throatily butchering something about a bra-full of bad news named Maria when the song suddenly dies in his mouth. His eyes are fixed on a big, red Dodge pickup with smoked-black glass that just burst through the dust ahead on this dirt gully of a road.
"Narcotraficantes," he mutters.
Drug runners. Salvador edges our truck as close as he can to the crumbly edge of the cliff on our right and stops, granting the red pickup every bit of road he can spare. No trouble here is the message he's trying to send. Just minding our own, non–drug-related business. Just don't stop. . . . Because what would we say if they cut us off and came piling out, demanding we speak slowly and clearly into the barrels of their assault rifles, while we explained just what we're doing out here in the badlands of Mexican marijuana country?
We're not federales, we'd have to stammer, or under-cover DEA. We're not searching for drugs, but for a people who are guarding something far more valuable: the secret oflongevityand perpetual health and happiness. The phantom Tarahumara Indians are said to have found a way topartyall their lives and never pay the consequences, living on a diet of carbs and beer but still being able to hop up and run more than 100 miles at a time, even in their 60s. . . .
I'm still rehearsing this speech when I notice that the truck has rumbled past, its crew invisible behind sealed black windows. Salvador watches in the rearview till the Dodge is again swallowed by dust, then slaps the steering wheel. "¡Bueno!" he shouts. "¡Andale pues, a más aventuras!" Excellent! On to more adventures!
Gradually, parts of me that have clenched tight enough to crack walnuts start to loosen, but I suspect it won't be for long. We set out yesterday from Chihuahua, driving all night across the desert and deep into the Sierra Madre, heading toward the upper rim of the Barrancas del Cobre -- Mexico's Copper Canyons, a maze of twisting gorges that run wider than the Grand Canyon. There are no roads where we're headed, or even mapped trails, which is just the way the Tarahumara like it.
Either you know where you're going, in other words, or you aren't getting there. And a few hours after our encounter with the deathmobile, that seems to sum up our situation. We went off-road long ago and are now crunching over a bed of pine needles, winding deeper and deeper into a darkening forest with no sign that any human has passed this way before. Salvador, however, is still belting out tunes, making turns based on trees he thinks look familiar.
And then, just as the sun sets, we run out of planet. We emerge from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead -- a crack in the earth so vast that the far side could be in a different time zone. And in a way, it is -- because standing nearby are three Stone Age men in togas, motionless as the mountains, as if they've been there forever.
This tribe may be one of the most ancient cultures on the planet, but, as I discovered in my pre-expedition research, its members actually have a lot in common with the average American guy.
Tarahumara men have a taste for corn snacks and beer, for instance. They're hard workers, but come downtime, they party like a rap star's roadies. Tarahumara men love sports, booze, and gambling so much, they'll stay up all night to watch a game, down enough beer in a year to spend every third day buzzed or recovering, and support their teams by literally betting the shirts on their backs.
Sound familiar? But here's where American and Tarahumara men part company: Many of us will be killed by heart disease, stroke, and gastrointestinal cancers. Almost none of them will.
None.
When it comes to the top 10 health risks facing American men, the Tarahumara are practically immortal: Their incidence rate is at or near zero in just about every category, including diabetes, vascular disease, and colorectal cancer. Age seems to have no effect on them, either: The Tarahumara runner who won the 1993 Leadville ultramarathon was 55 years old. Plus, their supernatural invulnerability isn't just limited to their bodies; the Tarahumara have mastered the secret of happiness as well, living as benignly as bodhisattvas in a world free of theft, murder, suicide, and cruelty.
So how do they do it? How is it that we, in one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth, can devote armies of scientists and terabytes of data to improving our lives, yet keep getting fatter, sicker, and sadder, while the Tarahumara, who haven't changed a thing in 2,000 years, don't just survive, but thrive? What have they remembered that we've forgotten?
That's the mystery that brought me here, to the deep Mexican outback, for this impromptu sunset encounter with three ambassadors from the past. Salvador eases the truck to a stop, and we slowly slide out. The three men facing us are dressed in white toga skirts and bright, billowing blouses that look like pirate shirts. Their faces are hard and angular, and their jet black hair is chopped low over their eyes in bowl cuts. On their feet are thin sandals lashed high around their calves with leather thongs, the kind you'd wear to a Halloween party if you were playing Julius Caesar.
"Cuira," Salvador greets them.
"Cuíraga," one of the men replies.
This "Hi/Hi to you" exchange pretty much exhausts Salvador's Tarahumara vocabulary. The Tarahumara speak an ancient, pre-Aztec language so obscure, it ended up accidentally changing their name. They really call themselves Rarámuri, or "The Running People," which was misunderstood by the conquistadors who invaded in the 16th century.
Luckily, we all know enough Spanish to make ourselves understood. Once they learn that we're not members of the murderous Fontes drug cartel, which has been terrorizing the canyons, one of the men -- Alejandro -- agrees to guide us by foot to his village, somewhere far below.
"If we leave in the morning, we should make it by dark," Alejandro says, then takes a second look at my all-too-American body. "If we leave very early."
By dawn, our sleeping bags are stowed, and we're ready to set out. The descent is so steep that every step is like doing a one-legged squat, but that doesn't bother 52-year-old Alejandro. Even though I have running shoes and a Camelbak and he's in open-toed sandals with a 3-gallon jug of tequila on his shoulder, he blows right past me. I find him standing by a tricky twist in the trail, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette while waiting to make sure I'm not lost. Then he's off, paddity-pat-patting his feet as fast as a double-Dutch rope skipper. This time, though, I'm on him; I stay hard on Alejandro's bare heels, sliding around switch-backs until I realize . . . he's gone.
This cat-and-mouse chase goes on all day until finally, just as the sun is dipping below the canyon walls and I'm ready to drop along with it, we reach a flat clearing near a river. Alejandro leads us behind a cluster of cacti, where we find a tiny, three-sided hut, with nothing else in sight in any direction. As far as Tarahumara settlements go, this is about as bustling as it gets; the Tarahumara are even reclusive with each other, keeping their homes concealed and a holler's distance apart. "
But despite their extreme shyness and distrust of "white devils," the Tarahumara are warm and extremely hospitable. The owner of the hut, Avelado, invites us to scoop from the family's pinole bucket, a plastic tub half-filled with a soupy mix of water and ground corn. It's surprisingly tasty, with the texture of instant oatmeal and the aroma of movie popcorn. Pinole to the Tarahumara is like rice to Asians; it's the major component of every meal, occasionally topped off with pinto beans, a little squash, sometimes mice or a chunk of rabbit. Most of the time, Avelado says, he just sips it by the cupful throughout the day.
We'd have caught an amazing party if we'd only been here a few months ago, Avelado mentions as we relax against the cool brick walls of his hut. He and his brothers had represented their village in a rarajipari -- a Tarahumara ball race -- against another village from across the canyon. It was wild, Avelado says; they drank all night, talking trash and laying down bets, then started the race at sunup. Each team had to move a hand-carved wooden ball along the trail as they ran, passing it from runner to runner by foot; it's like an endless soccer fast-break drill, except on a rocky trail, with exposed toes and a rounded lump of hardwood.
"How long was the race?" I ask. Avelado raises a single finger. "One mile? One hour?" Avelado shakes his head. "One day."
I don't understand it: How come they're not hobbled by overuse injuries? How do they get away with pounding beers and all that carb-loaded pinole? And I have no idea what any of this has to do with cancer, suicide, and stroke: Even if there is a magical, bulletproofing benefit to being in amazing shape, how are the Tarahumara pulling it off with a diet and training worse than mine?
Then, the Tarahumara tell me about a stranger named White Horse. A lone runner of the High Sierra, "Caballo Blanco" often visits the village during his long, rambling journeys through the mountains. When I track Caballo down, he turns out to be an American named Micah True. Ten years ago, True met a Tarahumara runner at an ultramarathon in Colorado, and it changed his life forever. Shortly after the race, he left behind his life in America to move down here, slowly turning himself into the world's only gringo
Tarahumara.
Tall and lean, with sun-bleached scraggles of hair jut-ting out from under his straw farmer's hat, Caballo opens up with surprising eloquence, verve, and wisdom.
"I saw a 95-year-old Tarahumara man walking across these mountains," Caballo begins. "Know why he could do it? Because no one told him he couldn't. If you put your body into a situation, it will figure out what to do." So that's what Caballo did; instead of trying to decipher the Tarahumara miracle, he went after it swimmin'-hole style -- by leaping in and figuring he'd either pick it up quickly or go down trying.
Even though he'd been nagged for years by ankle problems, he ditched his running shoes and mimicked the Tarahumara by hitting the trails in sandals. He began eating pinole for breakfast and carrying it with him in a hip bag during his 30-mile runs over the mountains. During these epic, all-day treks through the badlands, Caballo lives by the Tarahumara culture of kórima -- the power of unconditional living. He depends on people volunteering water, the food he'll need to get home, shelter if he's caught out overnight, and help if he falls.
The result: He's now healthier, stronger, and freer of injuries than he's ever been. As proof, he describes a run he likes to do between two canyon towns: Horseback riders do it in 3 days; Caballo does it in 7 hours. He's not sure how it all came together, what proportions of sandals and pinole and kórima, but he's convinced it will work for just about anyone.
"You can do it, too," Caballo assures me. Maybe -- but does it mean I have to live in a hut and consume corn mash, or is there a more American-friendly version of the Tarahumara method? There's one way to find out: In 1 year, Caballo is holding a 47-mile race against the Tarahumara down here in the canyons. At this point, I'm 20 pounds overweight and can't run more than 5 miles a day without injury, let alone 30 miles across the mountains in sandals.
So why don't I go home, Caballo suggests, try leaping into the pool, then see what happens on race day?
Thus begins My Year of Living Tarahumarically.
The whole experiment will live or die by cartilage. If I can't find a way to ramp up my running miles without being leveled by injuries, then this race is over long before the starting line. So I call Eric Orton, an ultrasport coach in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who specializes in the long stuff, like the Ultraman (a double Ironman) and Desert RATS (Race Across the Sands) 6-day foot-race. Orton is also fascinated by the Tarahumara's legendary endurance and grills me for details of my trip. He then echoes Caballo's advice: Lose the shoes.
Orton is part of a growing movement of Free Your Feet rebels, who believe it's not running that causes injuries, but running form and economy of training. One of the more vocal -- and surprising -- members of this group is Gerard Hartmann, Ph.D., an exercise physiologist who works with the world's greatest marathoners and also consults for Nike. According to Hartmann, the vast majority of running-related foot injuries are a result of too much foam-injected pampering. Running shoes have become so supercushioned and motion-controlling, they allow our foot muscles to atrophy and our tendons to shorten and stiffen. Without strength and flexibility, injuries are inevitable.
"The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury," Hartmann explains. "If I give you a collar to wear around your neck, in 4 to 6 weeks, we'll find 40 to 60 percent atrophy of musculature. That's why this emphasis on cushioning and motion control makes no sense.
One of Hartmann's star clients, marathon world-record holder Paula Radcliffe, has been training in the Nike Free, a new, minimalist slipper designed to mimic the range of motion of a naked foot. Alan Webb, America's best miler, also works out in the Free. Webb had been hobbled by foot injuries early in his career, but after he started barefoot exercises, his injuries disappeared, and his shoe size shrank, from a 12 to a 9. "My foot muscles became so strong, they pulled my arches up," says Webb. "Wearing too much shoe prevents you from tapping into the natural gait you have when landing on the ground."